New Books
It is a trite and rather patronizing statement that a certain book should be read by every high school teacher. If it were to be used at all, however, it might be used in connection with Professor Bell's charming little work, which came out a few months ago. It is a combination of historical information and material to show the nature of the various branches of elementary mathematics, with some excursions into such fields as complex numbers, transformations, groups, algebraic numbers, transcendental numbers, and the infinite in mathematics. It begins with a treatment of the purposes of mathematics, and ends with a reference to some of the prominent theories of the last quarter of a century. It allows the reader to find out without undue difficulty the nature and bases of the postulates of mathematics, the development of the underlying rules of the science, the significance of invariants and projections, and the nature of geometry as considered by mathematics of the present day.
